[MEI-L] Technical Team Meeting Report

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear MEIers,

one and a half weeks ago, the Technical Team has met for another virtual meeting using UVa's Elluminate. In this very productive meeting, we discussed mainly the next release of MEI. In the name of this group, I would like to report back to the Council and the wider audience on this list about our proposals. If you would like to learn more about any of these things, if you have further questions, opinions etc., the Technical Team will be happy to answer and / or discuss them on this list.

RELEASE
The Technical Team came to the conclusion that it might be good compromise to split up the next release into several pieces in order to accomodate different needs. We propose to freeze the code of the schema itself right now. This means that no changes to the schema specification will be included in the release to come, but instead will go into the development branch for the following release. This allows the software developers amongst us to adjust their applications to the next release without having to hit a moving target due to ongoing changes in the schema. 
At the same time, we agreed that it would be helpful to provide a first version of the Guidelines for the wider audience. Although the work on the Guidelines has already started, this will take some more time, probably until early next year.* The third component we would like to see ready for the next release is a small collection of sample encodings. A first draft of this collection is already in place, but there is still a lot of work to be done here as well. 
The consequence of this is that we propose to offer the schema under the name "MEI 2012" and as first part of the next release on our website, but without too much "public noise". As soon as we have the other parts in place, we will bundle everything and announce it to appropriate listservs etc. This will probably happen early next year (hence the preliminary name "MEI 2012"). 

FEATURES: FRBR
In the last week of October, Axel Teich Geertinger was in Detmold to discuss  – among other things – a potential integration of FRBR into MEI. These "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records" propose a way of organizing bibliographic records, but they are also very suitable to organize the relationships between works (including different versions) and sources. Although this looks very promising, implementing FRBR has some implications that would certainly delay the release (at least of the schema) significantly. The Technical Team therefore proposes to put that into the development branch for the following release. In the meantime, Axel's merMEId and Detmold's Edirom will implement these features in order to get more experience with them and to mature a really convincing solution for this.

FEATURES: Ossia
During the last (Technical Team) meeting in July 2011, some confusion about the model for encoding Ossias was left. During this meeting, we discussed it again and reassured, that the current model is well suited for MEI with only some minor additions to the tag library. Basically, an <ossia> element will be allowed within <measure> (where it contains alternating <staff> elements) and within <staff> (where it contains <layer>s). What needs to be specified then is the order in which these elements appear in a score. Here we agreed that the encoding order is significant: The first <staff> in an <ossia> will always describe the topmost alternative, the last will describe the lowest etc. Will the information gathered from there will be valid for all staves, only the <staff> that fits the surrounding measures (the original-sized alternative) will point to a <staffDef> using its @def-attribute. In combination, this clearly specifies which <staff> goes in line, and which is an alternative provided above or below the staff.

MEIron
The toolbox introduced under the name "MEIron" should not be part of the next release. Although we constantly work on this, it is unlikely that it will be ready when the other parts of the MEI 2012 release are. Maybe parts of this toolbox will be published together with the release, but we suggest to not delay this release for the complete MEIron, as its functionality will probably increase continuously. 
Regarding the MEIron itself, we made clear that this should by no means encourage any "canonical MEI", but instead provide means on how to convert from one solution in MEI to another (for instance: ties encoded as attributes converted to elements) without prioritizing any of them. Concerning the eponymous "flattening" part of the MEIron, we will provide an XSLT script that will reduce an encoding to a "flat" MEI file following simple rules ("always pick the variant from source A"). As soon as the user wants to make individual decisions an each of the branchings, we recommend to use Julian's MEISE (MEI Score Editor) instead, which offers a graphical user interface and is already capable of making these decisions. 

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Another virtual meeting for the Technical Team is scheduled in three months from now, with no precise date set yet. If a Council Member or someone else wants to participate in parts of this meeting, please contact me. If you have questions about this report and the meeting we had, we'd be happy to answer them. In case the Council agrees with our proposals, we will proceed as described here. 


In the last time, we had several discussions about MEI by other means, so that on this list it seemed like there was no activity. This was absolutely not true, and I apologize for the impression. Most of the stuff was purely technical, but we shall try to use this list more frequently in order to keep everyone up to date. 


In the name of the Technical Team, and with best regards,
Johannes Kepper





* There are still chapters in the Guidelines that are not assigned to someone yet. We are always looking for volunteers to take a lead on those. This does not mean that you have to write everything by yourself, but you are responsible of completing this chapter. Perry Roland and Johannes Kepper, and the Technical Team in general, will be happy to help you with technical or other issues by any means. If you would like to contribute some more time to MEI, this is a great opportunity for non-programmers! See the list of chapters and their current assignments online at http://tinyurl.com/dyhsyu6.